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Building a Game Around Cheaters
page 2

I agree with some things. Aiding the players and also helping the cheaters out isn’t too bad…. But trading between players is just so theoretically (and statistically) useless that the card farming it would incur isn’t worth it. Imagine if in an MMO, they added an option for quicktrades where you would simply put down items and after 15 seconds, if not confirmed, the trade would autoconfirm… It wouldn’t help anything, but it would encourage cheating.

> … there’s so much bad game design in this thread, now that I read it. Tomorrow I’ll analyze and explain what would actually be healthy, and proficient for kongai. Not that this should be restricted to kongai, since it’s already got 900 threads elsewhere. I’m kind of sick of it, really.
Alright, to come off the topic of Kongai, I’ll bring up another case where an entire community of a game has been restricted due to cheaters.
I’m sure that most people know of the game runescape. Fairly recently, they’ve implemented a system that only allowed what they consider “fair trades”. Each item was given a value in their database, and the overall value between you and who is trading must be within a certain amount of gold. This was to keep people that were botting on an alt from transferring earnings to their main. This system upset many people, including non-cheaters. Non-cheaters could no longer give things to their friends, and earning money depends mostly on if someone decides to buy something from you, or the guy offering next to you. I personally believe that an MMO needs to allow Laissez-faire capitalism, and not restrict the players and the economics with-in a game. Catering the game to prevent cheating makes many legit players upset.

I definitely agree that the fair trades in Runescape was a bad idea. Instead of keeping players from trading, they should have left it the way it was. I think that as long as the cheating does not greatly affect the other users playing, developers shouldn’t limit fair players to stop it. Cheating in runescape only got you better items and money, which did not affect anyone else.
If the cheating affects the other players too much something has to be done (ie. Stick Arena). Hacking in Stick Arena completely ruined the experience for most people.

If Jagex would of left it the way it was you would of been selling yews for say… 2gp each??
They did fair trades to limit bots too dontchaknow. And RWT did affect you. I have 5$ in my pocket right now and I could earn it in a minute. But how long and how much effort did you put into getting your Blue Partyhat? The several hundred million GP you put into that hat helped Runescape’s economy while the 5$ gave some nerd enough money to go buy some Ramen

Fair trades suck… And party hats were never good for the economy… It’s a bunch of rich people hoarding money.
And so what if Yews price lowered? I doubt it would, because the only point of them was to be destroyed via alchemy for cash. They would never go down in price.

> If Jagex would of left it the way it was you would of been selling yews for say… 2gp each??
No, not really. I was playing RuneScape for a while (before and after “Runescape 2”), and have never seen the economy crash in the way you are portraying it.
> They did fair trades to limit bots too dontchaknow.
We’ve established that, and that’s part of the original problem I proposed. Read the first post on the thread.
> And RWT did affect you. I have 5$ in my pocket right now and I could earn it in a minute. But how long and how much effort did you put into getting your Blue Partyhat? The several hundred million GP you put into that hat helped Runescape’s economy while the 5$ gave some nerd enough money to go buy some Ramen
I can’t say that Real World Trading is right (actually, I disagree with it strongly), but it never really did affect me. The small portion of people involved with RWT, relative with the rest of the community, do not break the game. Just because you can buy a hat for $5.00, doesn’t mean that the entire infrastructure of the economy will collapse to the ground.
There are other items that people can buy, such as weapons and armor, etc., which can give players advantages, and I’m aware of that, but again, the economy within the game will not collapse from this, and it is likely that you will not experience the result of someone who is involved with real world trading. Again, though, making the entire community suffer because of a few people that are involved in real world trading is wrong. It actually made me never want to return to the game again.

Well, I like the way Kongregate has it. You earn badges & cards solely for your personal benefit, if you want to cheat, go ahead, you’re only cheating yourself.
In games like Stick Arena (Which really ticks me off because it’s an amazing game, or used to be) where hackers make up 99.9% of the game, it’s just a rip-off.

> Well, I like the way Kongregate has it. You earn badges & cards solely for your personal benefit, if you want to cheat, go ahead, you’re only cheating yourself.
Having all the cards can be an advantage over newer players with less cards. Though, it isn’t as great an advantage as in Stick Arena.

> Having all the cards can be an advantage over newer players with less cards.
I agree, which is why the situation is more complex than it may seem.
Also, at this point, I’ve had feedback on two different scenarios, both of which yielded very different responses. From the people who have posted in this thread so far, it appears more people support the inability to trade cards in Kongai, but less people support the “fair trade” system in RuneScape. If the general concept is the same, what is it that makes one scenario yield very different responses (from mostly the same people) than the other?

Jon… I don’t see how fair trades in runescape and card trading in Kongai are similar…. In runescape, it takes a set amount of time to get certain goods (or a roughly set amount of time) and if you don’t have the level, time, or inclination to get them, you buy them or get gifts from your friends. The problem is, with fair trading, you can no longer trade efficiently. Granted, it means that they don’t have all the money hoarded in the banks of level 3 accounts who just trade all day buying low and selling high, but free trading basically ruined a lot of stuff. Not to mention the fact that you can’t give people gifts anymore, which sucks. In other words, they took a perfectly good and working and went so insane over real world trading that they ruined it.
Compare it to Kongai, where trading is not necessary. The amount of time needed to get the items you could be gifted or trade for at a high or low price in runescape is a significant investment of time that you can just buy away. In Kongai… It’s the investment of a few matches played or 20 minutes beating the weekly challenge. Trades are not necessary for everybody to meet their end goal or get closer too it, but would make cheating seem like a more valid option among the limited ring of people who would get use out of trading.